The glue holding the Joseon system together…

The glue holding the Joseon system together is education, meaning socialization into Confucian norms and virtues that begin in early childhood with the reading of the Confucian classics.

The model figure is the so-called true gentleman, the virtuous and learned scholar-official who is equally adept at poetry or statecraft.

Education start very early, as Korean students have to master the extraordinarily difficult classical Chinese language—tens of thousands of written characters and their many meanings; rote memorization is the typical method.

Throughout the Joseon Dynasty, all official records, all formal education, and most written discourse was in classical Chinese.

With Chinese language and philosophy, of course, comes a profound cultural penetration of Korea, such that most Joseon arts and literature come to use Chinese models.